We’ll discuss all these attributes in depth below, but first, let us look in pricing.

Primary Features

Getresponse’s attribute set is arguably among the most comprehensive out there.

Not only does it provide all of the crucial stuff you’d expect from an email advertising platform – record templates, hosting, autoresponders, analytics and so forth, but as mentioned above, it has been expanding the attribute set to the point where it is morphing into an all-in-one / CRM-style marketing platform.

The inquiry is whether Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of not – let’s drill down to the crucial qualities to find out.

Customer Support

Up until very recently Getresponse support was one of the most comprehensive available for email advertising tools: the company offered phone support alongside live chat support, email service and assorted online tutorials / tools.

Sadly, the telephone support has been discontinued. Instead you’ll need to use live chat (24/7) or email support. To be fair, most similar e-marketing platform providers only offer you these two stations – if phone service is a deal-breaker for you you might wish to contemplate Aweber, which still provides it (you can read our Aweber review here).

In terms of the quality of Getresponse support, I’ve not had to use it quite often (a fantastic thing) but when I’ve I’ve discovered it to be a bit of a mixed bag (less of a fantastic thing). A number of the live chat support I’ve received was outstanding, and I haven’t had to wait too long to chat with an agent; the email service .

Some of the feedback I’ve got from our readers does indicate that there do have to be improvements made in terms of the caliber of service Getresponse offer. As with a lot of these types of companies, I anticipate it boils down to that you get on the day. What Is Email Marketing Software

Analytics

Getresponse provides some very comprehensive reporting and analytics choices. You get all the Fundamentals of track – open rate, click-through, unsubscribe Prices and so on – but also to that you will find some very nifty features Which Are worth a particular mention, specifically:

‘one-click segmentation’: the option to identify people who did not participate with an e-newsletter that you shipped and set them in a section of readers which you can then email again using another version of the e-newsletter

‘metrics over time’: you can discover just when most of your subscribers do it on your emails, and period your prospective mailouts according to this information

’email ROI’: by incorporating some monitoring code to your post-sales webpage on your website, you can discover how efficiently (or not!) Your email campaigns are driving sales, and work out your return on investment in electronic mail marketing.

Per-user info – you can click one of your subscribers and see where they signed up from, where they’re found and which emails they have opened previously.

Mailchimp and Aweber offer some similar reporting functionality (particularly around sales monitoring ) but Getresponse’s reporting application is definitely one of most featured on the market (it certainly trounces the stats options offered by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

Templates

Thus far so good with Getresponse, but in regards to templates, Getresponse arguably falls down a bit.

Unfortunately, the templates provided from the box look somewhat dated; they are not as attractive as the ones offered by Mailchimp or even Campaign Monitor (and I slightly prefer Aweber’s offering here also ).

On the other hand, the templates are extremely tweakable – you can change fonts, designs and imagery easily enough with all the controls supplied; and naturally there is nothing to stop you simply designing your HTML email template and importing the code for it.

Furthermore, there are a lot of templates to choose from — over 500 — and they are presented in easy-to-understand classes, therefore it’s generally pretty straightforward to locate a good beginning point for a template and then edit it before you’re happy with the plan.

If you are really unhappy with the templates provided by Getresponse, there’s also the option of buying a template from a third party provider such as Theme Forest.

Another thing worth pointing out seeing Getresponse’s templates is the assortment of RSS-to-email software options aren’t so extensive (just 11 templates are provided – well short of the 700+ accessible for routine newsletters!) And a few of them played a bit for me when I tested them in Outlook (2010). I eventually found something that worked for me, but I think that there are definitely a few improvements that could be made in this region. What Is Email Marketing Software

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters which are delivered to your subscribers at intervals determined by you personally — you can set them up so that immediately after somebody signals up to your mailing list, they receive a welcome message in the business; a week after they could receive a discount offer for some of your products or services; three months after they could receive an invitation to accompany you on social networking. And so Forth.

Getresponse’s autoresponder functionality is a key selling point – it offers among the most extensive feature sets available.

You can send either time-based or action-based messages; time-based options include cycles like the illustration above, and also action-based messages may be triggered by user actions or advice, such as:

Opens

clicks

contributors to particular lists

changes in contact preferences

completed trades / targets

birthdays

changes in user information

Lately Getresponse launched a brand new version of the new autoresponder functionality, called’Marketing Automation.’

This allows you to make automation workflows with a drag and drop builder – you essentially install an’automation flowchart’ that educates Getresponse what to do when a user opens a specific offer, clicks on a specific link .

This kind of functionality goes way beyond what has traditionally been on offer from autoresponders, and allows you to make a user travel which may be customised to the nth level.

For a fast overview I’d suggest having a look at Getresponse’s video review for Marketing Automation.

It’s important to notice, however, these more innovative marketing automation features are only available to the pricier plans – the’Pro’ plan and upward. What Is Email Marketing Software

Landing page Builder

Online advertising campaigns that use landing pages will usually generate far more leads in the event, instead of simply directing people to a (cluttered!) Website, they tip users to appealing’squeeze pages’ comprising clear info and a tidy, well-designed data capture type.

Getresponse provides something very beneficial in this respect that the majority of its rivals do not: a landing page creator (and one that’s mobile-friendly to boot).

Products such as Campaign Monitor and Aweber ask that you use a third party (and paid-for) landing page creating tool such as Unbounce or Instapage; Mailchimp lately introduced some landing page performance but it’s yet to become sophisticated at Getresponse’s.

But unless you are on a Getresponse’Guru’,’Max’ or’Enterprise’ plan, the Getresponse landing page performance is rather limited: you can just create one landing page, which could simply be displayed 1,000 times a month.

Additionally, and above all, you can’t utilize the landing page A/B testing functionality on the least expensive Getresponse program (where the machine indicates a sample of your users different variations of your landing page, computes conversion rates, and ultimately rolls out the best performing landing page automatically).

If you’re serious about landing pages – and they are unquestionably a useful feature – then it’s definitely worth looking at one of the more expensive Getresponse plans.

You may purchase the Landing Pages attribute as an add-on to get an extra $15 a month, but very frustratingly, even though the add-on allows you to display an infinite number of landing pages to prospective subscribers, it does not include A/B testing.

Therefore, if I had been interested in the Getresponse landing page performance, I wouldn’t bother with this rather half-baked add-on: I’d just go for one of the more expensive programs (which I guess is exactly what Getresponse would like you to do) .

Mobile-Responsive Design

Getresponse was before its competitors for quite some time using its responsive email design functionality, which automatically adjusts your e-newsletter’s template so that if an individual is reading it on a mobile device, the layout and fonts will be optimized for the device in question.

Most competing products have caught up on this today, and offer responsive email templates, but Getresponse is better than most similar products when it comes to displaying a reactive preview of your e-newsletter – you just hit on a’cellphone preview’ button for an instant snapshot of what your email looks like on a smartphone (see image right).

Not just this but you can’reverse’ the smartphone trailer around, so you can preview what your email looks like when the display is used in either portrait or landscape style. What Is Email Marketing Software

Customer Relationship Management

One of the most frustrating aspects of using many well-known CRM tools is the need to export information to CSV and straight back into your email marketing instrument as a way to perform mailouts (or the necessity to export data from your email marketing tool into your CRM to include leads to it).

When I saw Getresponse recently introducing a brand new CRM feature into their plans I had been intrigued – that could potentially do away with all that data exporting and importing, and keep everything neatly in 1 area.

Initially I was not that impressed with all the Getresponse CRM tool since you can only use it in order to perform rather basic tasks: you could create sales pipelines, add contacts to them and track activity (mails, phone calls etc.) with those contacts manually.

But recently Getresponse have upped their game somewhat on this front. The CRM is currently integrated with all Getresponse’s email marketing functionality and you can add users into a CRM pipeline based on their action (form completions, email opens, purchases etc.) or trigger autoresponders depending on the addition of a new contact to a pipeline stage.

An example of how you could use this operation would be as follows:

It is possible to add a contact to a particular stage on a sales pipeline depending on the page of your site that they completed a form ;

you could then send a automated email tailored to this pipeline period a few days later;

and dependent on the actions they took in regards to that email (clicking on a certain link ) you could automatically move them onto another phase of the pipeline and invite invite them into a webinar.

It is very clever stuff, and I can’t think of any email advertising product offering this kind of tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this type of functionality you normally need to appear at committed — and more costly — CRM products such as Salesforce and Infusionsoft.

However, it is not all fantastic news about the CRM front there are some big things missing out of Getresponse’s CRM attribute set.

The most glaring omission is email activity monitoring. Other CRM packages permit you to bcc a dropbox email address any time you send an email to a lead or customer; doing so keeps a record of this communication from the contact’s history. There is now no method of doing this with all the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an simple way to send one-to-one mails to leads or clients.

And strangely, if you click on a contact within a bargain pipeline, you can’t see their contact activity — i.e., the actions they’ve taken (open, clicks etc.) in regards to previous communications that you have sent to your leads are not displayed. To observe this, you need to go out of the CRM part of Getresponse, search for your contact in the contacts section and click in their details. But guess what? Doing this does not exhibit their deal history.

Task management is non-existent too: unlike dedicated CRM tools, there’s no way to assign tasks to other group members.

Finally, adding contacts into your pipeline stage is tough. You need to add contacts to a list , then visit the CRM pipeline, include a bargain and hunt your lists to receive the contact you just added. From a usability standpoint this is very clunky and time consuming. You should just be able to add a deal directly to a pipeline and then enter the contact details of your guide or client at that point.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is a bit half-baked. But that said, it’s a new feature and the things it can do on the automation aspect is remarkable. I’m optimistic that this feature gets developed over time since done right, it is possibly a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

Webcasts

Getresponse recently introduced the ability to host webinars on the stage.

Given that webinars are generally utilized as a lead-generation strategy, the notion of getting your email database and your webinar tool under precisely the exact same roof is very attractive.

The pricing is also very competitive also by comparison to established webinar solutions. For instance, among the primary webinar providers, Gotowebinar, fees $199 per month to host webinars with as much as 500 attendees; you can really do exactly the same (and a great deal more) with Getresponse for $165 (as long as your list size is below 25,000).

With regard to attendee limits, the Getresponse’Guru’ program allows you to sponsor a webinar with around 100 participants; the’Max’ program’s limit is 500.

You can also purchase webinars performance as a add on to a cheaper plan: $40 per month buys you a 100 attendees limit, $99 a month buys you a 500 attendees restrict. It isn’t clear what your options are if you need to host larger scale webinars than that however.

Two or Three Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being especially useful are:

The very fact Your attendees don’t need to install any applications to attend the webinars

one-click list of your webinars

screensharing performance

free online storage for playback files

Ultimately webinar performance is potentially an extremely useful feature to have sitting in your e-marketing arsenal and its addition as a feature provides Getresponse a very significant advantage over its key competitors, particularly once you consider that you can link it in using a built-in CRM tool (more about this in a moment). What Is Email Marketing Software

Email Deliverability

The email deliverability rate – the percentage of e-newsletters sent that successfully hit inboxes – is always an important thing to look at when selecting an email marketing tool.

Not all email advertising providers are that forthright about their deliverability prices; but Getresponse seems pretty open about this, with this to say about it in their own website:

At GetResponse we’re often asked about the quality of our deliverability speed. Because deliverability depends on many things, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for each mailing. For our customers collectively, nevertheless, we’re pleased to say our overall deliverability rate currently stands at 99%.

Clearly you are going to have to take the company’s term for this, but supposing it is true, it is a fantastic speed and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails that you send using Getresponse will reach their receivers.

What’s more, Getresponse really gives you the deliverability rate of each message in your email analytics – that is something that I haven’t encountered on competing goods’ metrics. A thumbs up for it.

I do need to pull Getresponse on one thing relating to deliverability however: to guarantee a high deliverability speed, it’s a good idea to use a platform called DKIM email authentication. You can use DKIM using Getresponse – but only on the costlier Getresponse’Max’ plans.

Although I’ve not struck any deliverability problems using the less costly plans, competing goods do not make you invest in a more expensive plan to avail of the feature — it’d be useful to see Getresponse becoming more generous here.

Email Opt-in

There are two methods you can employ to add subscribers to a mailing list: using a’single opt-in’ or a’double click’ process.

If you use use a single opt-in process, the person registering to your mailing list is added to your mailing list the moment they hit the submit button on your sign up form.

With a double opt-in process, the person signing up to your list is sent an email containing a confirmation link that s/he have to click before being subscribed.

The main advantage of one opt-in process is that it makes it really simple for users to sign up for your mailing list; it also generally increases conversion speed and so the number of readers on your list. A dual opt-in procedure is better for verifying that the people subscribing to a record are using real email addresses and contributes to cleaner data and more accurate stats (because open rates etc. ) are calculated based on a list comprising just email addresses).

Now, the fantastic news is that Getresponse permits you to make use of either opt-in approach – this is not true with all competing goods. So a thumbs up for Getresponse to be flexible about this.

Collecting Data

There are two ways to use forms in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form that you style yourself, or you can design your kind in Getresponse (picking from an adequate range of templates and tweaking them to suit your site design). If you like the latter route, you may add the form it to your website using a snippet of code which runs a few Javascript to show your type — that can be shown in a range of different formats (for example inline, pop-up or slide-up).

You are probably thinking that this sounds quite fine — but to tell the truth, I think there is a lot of room for improvement with regard to Getresponse kind templates.

For a start, they are not responsive (i.e., they won’t resize themselves automatically to suit the device they’re being watched on).

Furthermore, no controllers are offered by Getresponse to switch forms off or on on particular devices or individual pages of your site. At the light of Google’s new strategy to pop-ups (where sites can have a hit in search results if they display’intrusive interstitials’ on cellular devices) this really is a small concern.

To get around this, I normally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do using HTML embeded forms which I style myself, and for popups I link my Getresponse into some growth-hacking instrument named Sumo (this enables me to change pop-ups off for mobile users, as well as display forms precisely as I’d love to and onto the webpages I need ). What Is Email Marketing Software

UI Experience

Overall, Getresponse is really straightforward to use. It’s certainly easy enough to perform all of the basics: import contacts, create campaigns, set up autoresponders and check numbers and the interface is really intuitive and clean.

In terms of how it stacks up against its rivals in this regard, I’d assert that Campaign Monitor is a little bit more user friendly, and Mailchimp includes a slicker user interface (although one which makes locating certain functionality a little bit tricky at times).

One place I feel that might be significantly better from a user-friendliness standpoint is the Getresponse e-newsletter editor.

Whilst its drag-and-drop approach does in theory provide a very flexible way to create blocks of articles and move them about an e-newsletter, in practice it is fairly clunky to use and can cause accidental deletion of material, or positioning of it in the incorrect portion of the e-newsletter.

If you can get your head around it, and practice using it a bit, it does result in a helpful tool – it is only that the execution of it might be somewhat better.

Also, as described above, the CRM instrument could be better from a usability point of view adding contacts to deals can be difficult.

Free Trial

This helps you avoid that annoying”oops I forgot I signed up for that trial and now I’m getting charged for a product that I don’t use” scenario.

The only down side to this free trial is the fact that it restricts the number of readers you can send to to 1000. It would be useful if that could be raised a bit, as it might help potential users try the tool out in more’real world’ situations.

Pricing

There are 3 main types of Getresponse pricing strategy -‘Email’,’Pro’ and’Max’ — and inside each of them, several additional types of plan to pick from (all based on list size).

Additionally there’s an”Enterprise” program for users that our lists transcend 100,000 email addresses: this starts at $1199, using exact pricing depending on prerequisites (if you are considering the”Enterprise” plan, you will want to contact Getresponse to schedule a presentation, outline your needs and discuss pricing).

Substantial discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 months of service (18% and 30% respectively) — these are much more generous than most competing platforms. What Is Email Marketing Software

Distinctions of Every Strategy

All the Getresponse plans cover the important fundamentals — key features include:

The capacity to import, grow and host an email database

a wide Assortment of templates

autoresponder functionality

responsive email designs

split testing

comprehensive reporting

RSS / site to-email functionality

comprehensive segmentation options

social sharing tools

There are a number of differences between the’Email’,’Guru’ and’Max’ programs but for me the main ones are:

Landing pages – you can only avail of landing pages that allow split testing and unlimited views if you are on a’Guru’ program or greater

Webinars – that functionality isn’t accessible whatsoever around the’Email’ strategy and the amount of webinar attendees is capped for the’Guru’ and’Max’ plans at 100, 500 respectively (it’s unclear what the limitation is on the’Enterprise’ plan).

Users – you can only have one user account on the’Email’ plan; by comparison you receive 3 on’Pro’, 5 ‘Max’ and 10 on’Enterprise’.

Pricing Vs Competitors

So long as you are pleased to use one of the entry-level’Email’ programs, the pay-per-month Getresponse plans are on the whole more affordable than those supplied by many of its key competitors, especially in case you’ve got a fairly high number of email addresses onto your own database.

For instance, in case you’ve got a mailing list comprising between 9,000 and 10,000 documents that you want to send an infinite number of emails each month to, you might discover that hosting it using Getresponse costs $65 per month.

That is:

$4 per month cheaper compared to Aweber

$10 cheaper a month than Mailchimp

$84 a month cheaper than Campaign Monitor*

Decision Campaign Monitor’s pricing structure is dependent not just the amount of email addresses in your own database however on how many emails you send per month also. If you’re happy to limit the amount of emails sent via Campaign Monitor (in the example above, to 50k emails), you can expect to pay a monthly fee of $89, still substantially higher than Getresponse’s.

The sole well-known service that I could think of that comes from considerably cheaper is Mad Mimi, which charges $42 a month to host up to 10,000 email addresses (note however that the performance provided by Mad Mimi is nowhere near as extensive as Getresponse’s or indeed another products mentioned above).

It’s also worth pointing out that Mailchimp offers narrower pricing rings, meaning that based on how big your listing, it might occasionally be a slightly cheaper alternative than Getresponse.

At the database end of things, Getresponse’s pricing is pretty competitive too – you can host a database containing 1,000 email addresses for $15 a month using Getresponse, compared to $29 with Aweber; $59 on Campaign Monitor (unlimited send).

Mailchimp’s monthly fee for a 1,000 record database will be exactly the like Getresponse’s; and Mad Mimi supplies a slightly more affordable, if much less operational offering for $12 a month.

Two final things to be aware of on the pricing front:

Some competing suppliers — notably Mailchimp – provide completely free account for users with a few records (but these don’t supply the entire range of features that you get on a paid program ).

As mentioned before, if you’re ready to pay upfront for 1 or two years, you can avail of significant discounts the other competitors do not yet supply.

So the bottom line is that Getresponse is pretty competitive in the pricing section. However, what about features? What Is Email Marketing Software

Conclusion

Getresponse represents one of the more cost-effective tactics to host and communicate with an email .

It is also one of the most interesting products of its kind – because it provides email marketing, landing pages, CRM and webinars all under a single roof. It is difficult to think of any competing product that delivers this’all around’ proposal, and it is what proceeds to persuade us to utilize it to Style Factory’s email advertising.

Some improvements to Getresponse do have to be made nonetheless, particularly where the email programmer is concerned – its drag and drop interface is more fiddly and not as responsive than it ought to be. A lot of improvements can be made to the data capture forms too, especially for users wishing to display them on mobile devices.

And from what I gather from reader opinions, there are improvements that could be made into the support offering.

Overall though I speed Getresponse very tremendously – you get substantial bang for your dollar with this product.

Here are a Couple of pros and cons of utilizing Getresponse overall:

Benefits of Getresponse

So long as you are pleased to utilize an’Email’ program, Getresponse is cheaper than many of its key competitors (in some cases, substantially so) whilst offering as much, if not more functionality as them.

The reductions you get when paying for a couple of years of support are extremely generous – you will be hard pushed to find comparable reductions in costs from key competitors.

Its webinar functionality is a USP – something that is not offered by any products that are similar.

Its own reporting and comprehensive split testing features are strong.

Getresponse is transparent about deliverability rates, publishing figures on its website and supplying deliverability statistics for person e-newsletters that you send.

It offers a very flexible approach to data segmentation – more elastic than many competing products.

It permits you to add subscribers to your mailing list on either a single-opt in and also a dual opt-in basis.

It sends responsive emails and permits you to preview smartphone versions of your e-newsletters really easily.

It comes with a useful landing page founder – but bear in mind that you have to be on a more expensive strategy to get the fully functional version of the.

You can try out all its features free for 30 days without needing to input credit card information.

Disadvantages of Getresponse

The drag and drop interface for designing emails can be a little bit on the side.

The information capture forms supplied aren’t responsive and you can not control when and in which they are displayed on your website.

CRM functionality needs to be improved substantially before it could be considered a replacement for a standalone CRM merchandise.